Month: December 2017

Speaking of the internal cues that signal “it’s all right; it’s done and you can stop now”, I am reminded once again to Donald Trump. He has a big mouth and constantly demonstrates that he lacks any sense of propriety or boundaries – even a sense that things might be precariously out of balance and dangerous. And he cannot stop himself; not now… or ever. He’s missing any sense of “it’s done; you can stop now” — which is, in everyday life, a person’s ordinary and necessary sense of closure and satisfaction in things large and small. Trump doesn’t have that self-regulating function.

Living life like that, carrying a nameless discomfort around day and night, year after year, without it ever reaching orgasm (release or closure), must be a living hell. It does go a long way toward explaining Trump’s chronic insomnia. And maybe his compulsive licentiousness. He lacks the capacity to feel satisfied, even with his own prior decisions— although they are decisions in only the most primitive and unreliable sense of that word. Clearly, when one gives such people power they become dangerous. And one wonders why that person’s supporters have allowed that to happen, and for what reasons.

On the other side of the divide, people who are technicians (as opposed to those who rely heavily on internal cues) use precisely those left-brain tools: they stop when they have met the explicit requirements of their job assignment or task. Are they “right” or “wrong” to do this? Neither. They’re just following a different brain-map and a more or less mechanical set of “assembly instructions”. If we were looking at two guitar makers operating out of these different mindsets then we could say that one would essentially be making a sculpture and would stop “when it was done”, while the other would be using the Numbered Instructions Model, and would stop when the instructions ended. If these individuals were painters then one would essentially be painting from a live model and the other would be painting by numbers — much like Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara had been doing when he was managing the Viet-Nam war; he’d been head of General Motors before then and his idea of running the war was to run it exactly like he’d run General Motors.

In the half-brain version of the previously given example of Engaging With An Enemy, the resolutions to such a task are unsatisfactory indeed. If you needed to engage with the enemy and had only a calculating brain, you’d very probably make up your mind that only one result was acceptable and go for it without flexibility, re-evaluation, or room for new input. Ecce Robert MacNamara – as well as General William Westmoreland and, later, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. If you had a Trumplike brain you would be announcing a new goal for the challenge every week and the troops in the field would be spinning their wheels until at the next election. The ineptness shown in these examples is breathtaking.

If these are silly examples they are also tragic ones, but they go to something that is equally basic to a certain kind of guitar making. For instance, my students have had a few breakthrough experiences in exploring this in their own guitar work. They’d ask me for an opinion of a bridge or rosette that they’d made… and perhaps be surprised that I was sort of lukewarm in my reception of it. We’d then sit down and discuss what I was seeing vs. what they were seeing — and what that was all about.

Those sessions never fail to be interesting: these individuals will have never yet been asked to sit down and simply look at something— and I do mean simply look at the thing, and think about it exactly as it is in the moment in and of and by itself, and how its various parts fit together, and how it fits into its own greater context, and certainly without anyone telling them what they should think about it.

They may have read books on how-to, or heard lectures about aesthetics, history of design, or concern with market value or the luthier who made a particular guitar, or had been made aware of other people’s pre-judgments and aesthetics (and unconsciously making these individuals into points of reference for how they should think about their own work)… but they had never been asked to think for themselves and have a sense of what they themselves really thought. I ask that one just look at something and get a sense of what it really is, and what one likes about it or dislikes about it, as it is at that moment… without me suggesting to them what they should think… and then talk to me about it.

About the political thing: it is clear to me that in that realm, too, people have never been allowed nor encouraged… to… uh… simply… think… for… themselves. But that is a great way to get in touch with a sense of whether “it’s done, I can relax now” or not.

Anyway, who knew that guitar making and politics were so intimately connected?

I’ve been writing about the creative process, which is a significant part of my own work. Although I don’t have formal certification or credentials in this area, I consider myself to be knowledgeable in matters of creativity and the workings of the human brain; I may not be an “expert” but I am certainly a well informed amateur. Part of my education in these matters is that I notice things in the world around me; and I do a lot of writing. Writing helps me to sort out the things I’ve noticed and make sense of them. It helps me to discover things I didn’t know that I knew, or connections that were there to be made but that I hadn’t made yet. I think you might enjoy some of my mental meanderings as regards creativity.

We can start with the fact that I am a guitar maker. And, as a guitar maker, I want my instruments to “look right”.

“Well, of course,” one can say. “Who doesn’t? But what does that actually mean?” Well, it means one of two things. Either someone is completing a project whose parameters and details have been decided from the outset, or one is doing something personal and winging it on a creative impulse. In the first case the project is “done” when the recipe has been fulfilled; the thing “looks right” because that means the same thing as having followed the recipe. Alternately, when one is approaching a “creative” project in a mechanical way, and the project has to be delivered by a certain deadline, the place to stop is when the time allotted has expired; the project is done, by definition. In the second case there is no recipe or fixed deadline to rely on; the project is “completed” and the thing looks “right” when it “feels” right and one “knows” that nothing else remains to be done. Thus, the right look actually has two distinct meanings. To illustrate them one can imagine a project that entails engaging with an enemy. When the project is done in the army way it is completed when the enemy is dead. When the project is done in the creative or personal way, it may be completed when one has won the enemy over and befriended him, or negotiated a peace with him.

One interesting way to get a handle on these distinct aspects of “the right look” has been through studies of the brain – about which some interesting research has been done lately. Some of this research has focused on certain unfortunate individuals who had, for one medical reason or another, needed to have the entire right or left lobe of their brains surgically removed. This horrible circumstance presented a unique opportunity for studying such subjects after they returned to “normal post-surgical life”. Except that their lives were not “normal” any longer.

The Right half of the brain, the scientists have told us, is responsible for imagination, emotion, lateral thinking, creativity, intuitive connectivity, and capacity to appreciate beauty. The Left half is the critical mind: it carries out the functions of linear thinking, logic, assessment, planning, and calculation. And the surgical recoverees were observed to have new deficits in their mental lives that were, unsurprisingly, a direct function of which half of their brains they’d lost.

[EDITORIAL NOTE: the concept of strict division of right-brain/left-brain functions has taken some hits lately as the scientific community has published studies on the plasticity of the brain and how one half of it can learn to take over some of the functions of the other half. Still, if one really only has one half of a brain, I think we can be given a bit of slack in being categorical about how the brain works; if there is only one half a brain, there is no other half to share plasticity with. Also, even though having only half a brain is an extreme circumstance, it can be useful to push something to an extreme in order to make a point about, or to get insights into, that thing. Extreme doesn’t necessarily invalidate.]

Individuals who lost the emotional part of their brains were found to retain memory as well as verbal, computational, and mechanical skills. But they lost the ability to make personal on-the-spot decisions based in personal preference — such as we all make a thousand times a day without even stopping to think about it. Such people would be completely stymied, for example, in trying to figure out where to go for the weekend, or even which breakfast cereal they’d most enjoy eating — without making long lists of these choices’ various pros and cons. If Mr. Spock had lost his right brain just before the Klingons attacked the Enterprise then he’d have to make lists of every possible scenario involved in responding to the attack, and they would have taken over the Enterprise before he got halfway through with that list.

On the other hand, individuals who’d lost the left halves of their brains couldn’t plan their way out of a paper bag. They couldn’t hold thoughts together. Their lives were dominated by impulse. They’d lost the ability to engage in calculation and goal-oriented, systematic (first-this-then-that), exploratory (what if), critical (i.e., if-this-then-that type), or even ordinary sorting-this-out-from-that thinking. Most terribly, they had lost the capacity to feel personally invested in anything, in the moment – which has everything to do with getting the normal internal cues to any sense of “rightness” or “wrongness” of anything. These people became incapable of making assessments. Their “thinking” also lacked any sense of complexity, comparative significance, consequences, depth, flexibility, or carry-over. They really were stuck in the realm of impulse. And, needless to say, they were as incapable of meaningful personal attachments as they were unable to engage in disciplined behavior.

Ecce Donald Trump who, as I write this in 2017, gives every sign of being genuinely brain damaged in this way. He seems equally upset by being given a bad tweet by a nine-year-old as he is by a criticism from a head of state. He has no sense of proportion or carry-over; he doesn’t remember what he said last week; he spends time insisting that Mexico to pay for a wall instead of appointing the ambassadors, officials, and functionaries who would be making the government function. With Trump the dial is always set at the same number and the oven is always set at the same temperature regardless of what’s being baked. Please, re-read the previous paragraph.

An ability to sense the “rightness” or “wrongness” of things, just mentioned above, brings us to the doorstep of art and design — in which the dominant mindset is the striving to arrive at the internal cues that signal “it’s right and it’s done and I can stop now.” The striving can be endlessly modified by training and experience all life long; but the artist (or cook, athlete, gardener, fisherman, etc.) stops only when he knows it’s time to stop; short of that, he keeps on working, expressing, and seeking. There is otherwise no calculation, statistic, timer, rule book, syllabus, recipe, blueprint, or deadline to otherwise tell him that his task is complete. Those are all left-brain tools. The artist simply stops when he “knows” that it’s time to stop.